Posted on December 16, 2015 by Jenny Cromack

This may seem like a very contradictory point, however I cannot overemphasis how important rest periods are during your training cycle. This is based on the assumption obviously that you are following a training regime, that is structured, and follows the golden fundamental of progressive overload, be it load or volume.

Planning your training long term is the key to success, think of any walk of life, finances, career’s, etc its very rare that you simply stumble upon the element you wish to achieve you must plan for it, training is exactly the same. But this planning must take into account rest periods.

So why are rest periods important? Adaptations to the body follow a very predictable pattern and can be summarized very well by Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) (1936). Hans was dubbed the father of stress research… a pretty good title. He developed the notion that chronic stress causes long term chemical changes in the body. What most people don’t realise, is that gym visits are generally a stressful occasion (I can almost hear you laughing). When we move resistance, push one of the energy systems during cardiovascular training, complete explosive movements such as jumps, or throws we place specific stress on the body. The body can only recover from this stressful time with sufficient rest periods.

The continual exposure to this stress will cause one or more of the following:

* Elevated stress hormones

* Reduction of anabolic processes

* Reduced digestive performance

* Cntral fatigue (neural)

* Disrupted sleep

* Reduced attention

* Reduced sex drive and many others.

Obviously different training regimes place very different stresses on the body, running for example places more stress on central systems such as stroke rate, respiration and structural ligaments involved in the exercise (such as the achilles tendon), where as power training places a greater stress on the nervous system, and may stress the central nervous system to a greater degree.

There a few steps in the GAS model we move through during training

• Alarm Phase– This represent the initial stage following exposure to a training stress. It is often described as the fight or flight response, its a very quick hormonal response that helps us survive in the face of danger. Think running, more glucose is made available, plasma insulin levels decrease (providing it’s a long run, 90 minutes+). Very different metabolic changes occur at shorter faster runs……so now you can start to see how different methods elicit different stresses on the body.

• Resistance Phase- By resistance, we don’t mean lifting weights, Hans simply means that adaptations occur, so that next time the body is placed under the stress in the alarm phase the body will be better prepared to deal with it. This occurs at a cellular and system level, and is SPECIFIC to the training stress placed upon it. Once again I’ll state that if your not planning and reviewing your training you won’t achieve the results you want. A key component of this resistance phase is REST… without rest the adaptations cannot occur, if you are constantly exposing your body to the specific stress, no adaptations can occur and that moves us on nicely to….

• Exhaustion Phase- Occurs when long term stress is not removed from the process…. think about running, if you do 800m intervals every day week after week for 3 weeks, what started as a 3min interval, will be closer to a 8min interval after 3 weeks as without sufficient rest periods planned into your training you are not giving your body time to recover. We call this overtraining!

The important point to take from this blog is that rest periods in your training cycle are critical in the process of developing any element in the gym. It doesn’t mean you have to take a week off the gym, put your feet up and eat biscuits for a week, but have an easier deload week instead.